In this post, we will look at the police from a political angle, but that does not mean we will have to focus only on the political types of work done by the police. To be 'post-political,' we will involve our political look on non-political activities of the police, and as such, post-politics does not imply ignoring one's own politics, but rather ignoring the tendency to see the other as simply political. The police is no longer a regulatory mechanism, characterized by acting at
certain times and receding at other times, but it must be always
present, always actively formulating tactics and strategies in real
time, it is now more so than ever at an intellectual (which is close
to the word “intelligent,” but we believe that the word
'intellectual' and its synonyms are kept hidden from the discourse
surrounding the police and criminal for a variety of reasons, and so
we deliberately use the word intellectual) level that the police
manifests itself, right down to the lowest ranks. The police vs.
criminal war is more about the utilization of intellect in
real time than other types of wars have been. There
is now a stoic and soldier-like acceptance of the power of the
intellect and the binding of intellect and controlling action in the
social. The police is in a post-political but not post-intellectual
world. This society is not simply a society of 'control,' in Deleuzian conception, which perhaps implies a political control as well, but, more
properly, this society is a society of 'intellectual control,' where what is important is not which political side one is on, but who is smarter in making decisions to capture and criminalize a citizen. It is intellect which has been formulated in a close relationship with controlling mechanisms, and it is the wresting control of intellect which is what is paramount for the police. In a somewhat related vein, the crime is not a stealing of physical property, but a stealing of 'intellectual property,' and the police is about controlling as well as utilizing this intellectual property. The police itself has formulated and constructed the property worthy of stealing. People do not steal and the police intercepts, anymore, rather, people wish to steal the intellectual property from the police itself. The police does not only mark the intellectual property with its safety seal, but it owns the property, it manipulates it, and it utilizes the sources of such property for its own uses. In a sense, what is at stake, that is, why the police is intellectual today, has not to do with any realization of the humility, common sense etc we associate with intellect, but rather, it is a short-term ploy to investigate whether authority in the style of schools and the school system really works for the type of work the police does. Focusing on the 'short term' and experimental agenda of the police, we are taking a more 'microscopic' look at the police and we are being micro-political in our critique of the police.
When
one moves through inhabited social spaces today, one is not just
confronted by police, one is not just protected by police, but one is
made police, one is schooled into police work. The police have become role models; the police have become the ideal citizens, the ideal egos, with which we identify. In Indian cities, the
loudspeaker informs
the public of the threat of suspicious activity, in the process erecting the police above us, as the source of proper information and knowledge. In the streets of
Kathmandu, the citizen's ego begins to imagine its own machines as
violent guns (and motorcycles became weapons), the ego identifies
with the policeman's ego and uniform;
the
police is schooling our egos with this logic of information and
uniforms, we are to subscribe to a 'school student mentality' because of the presence of the police in uniforms; they are students and we too are to be learners like them. The police does not perform violent interjections into society in the name of safety, but it learns from society and makes subtle, calculated decisions; when it is not moving, it is thinking of how to control. It is the appropriate model of identification for the sophisticated citizen of today. One has
thus internalized the policing mentality because of the mere presence of police patrolling the streets. The mere presence of the police, the mere observation that the police is there in a social space elicits in our citizens a policing mentality. And it is this internalization
of the policing mentality by us which ultimately helps the police
itself move on to a more intellectual plain, aloof from its duties of
physically policing; gone are the days when it will imprison and
rehabilitate, but even imprisoning and rehabilitating has to be
contextualized within the logic of the police's own intellectualism: think of the information sessions on drinking and driving prevalent in Kathmandu these days, where intellect has been used to effectively distract us from the fact that we are being imprisoned. Indeed, isn't the first step of police education the converting of a prisoner into a policeman? The idea is not rehabilitating to the middle ground of 'normal citizenry,' but the oscillating from 'criminal' to 'enforcer.'
It seems that the police has been enlisted by the school in doing its classroom work, but this too is a temporary alliance, because what the police is really going towards, it seems, of which schooling is a step on the way, is the formation of a micro-level but thriving prison-industrial complex in Kathmandu, a micro-industry where imprisonment is a matter of days and hours rather than months and years. And just as 'education' is the first step towards a micro-enterprise, education, awareness and good publicity is the first step towards the police's micro-industry. The police seeks to administer a type of education by itself, thereby fractioning off the school system. The benefits of a prison industry are not that obvious: we are not being quickly rehabilitated to be better citizens, but we are to learn the police's thinking, we are to think like the police, we are to be the students of the police, for it is in the school's system and environment that we are most likely to accept authority. Another possible reason for this prison industry is that the police has realized that citizens of Nepal are no longer always everpresent to its jurisdiction and to its authority: many people leave the country and the police's sphere of influence. The police modifies its role to school the citizens to prepare for another authority, which establishes a connection and relation between the two police forces, forming a global network of 'cooperation and friendship' between forces of authority. The goal is to create 'plastic products' that do not bend or melt or break; industry is known for strong, disciplined products. In the police's alliance with schools and the tactics of schools, the police is appearing responsible, thoroughly borrowing from the images that schools have in our societies, and at the level of tactics, it is beginning to have a stake in the development of life's trajectory of its citizens: as a 'police academy,' and not police force, the police wants to create a particular type of citizen student, namely, an informal policeman. This is just its latest tactic in countering crime. In the end, we as responsible citizens are not just to help the police by informing it, for we are not smart enough to inform it, but we are to accept its intellect/intelligence and act directly as its lowest level officers. We have all become policemen, while the uniformed policemen themselves do the work of students, which means that they use their mind more than their guns in the streets today.
It seems that the police has been enlisted by the school in doing its classroom work, but this too is a temporary alliance, because what the police is really going towards, it seems, of which schooling is a step on the way, is the formation of a micro-level but thriving prison-industrial complex in Kathmandu, a micro-industry where imprisonment is a matter of days and hours rather than months and years. And just as 'education' is the first step towards a micro-enterprise, education, awareness and good publicity is the first step towards the police's micro-industry. The police seeks to administer a type of education by itself, thereby fractioning off the school system. The benefits of a prison industry are not that obvious: we are not being quickly rehabilitated to be better citizens, but we are to learn the police's thinking, we are to think like the police, we are to be the students of the police, for it is in the school's system and environment that we are most likely to accept authority. Another possible reason for this prison industry is that the police has realized that citizens of Nepal are no longer always everpresent to its jurisdiction and to its authority: many people leave the country and the police's sphere of influence. The police modifies its role to school the citizens to prepare for another authority, which establishes a connection and relation between the two police forces, forming a global network of 'cooperation and friendship' between forces of authority. The goal is to create 'plastic products' that do not bend or melt or break; industry is known for strong, disciplined products. In the police's alliance with schools and the tactics of schools, the police is appearing responsible, thoroughly borrowing from the images that schools have in our societies, and at the level of tactics, it is beginning to have a stake in the development of life's trajectory of its citizens: as a 'police academy,' and not police force, the police wants to create a particular type of citizen student, namely, an informal policeman. This is just its latest tactic in countering crime. In the end, we as responsible citizens are not just to help the police by informing it, for we are not smart enough to inform it, but we are to accept its intellect/intelligence and act directly as its lowest level officers. We have all become policemen, while the uniformed policemen themselves do the work of students, which means that they use their mind more than their guns in the streets today.
When
the police leaves the barracks, it is directly immersed into
conflict, every decision it makes is directly related to its conflict
with criminals and crime. The criminal's actions are not of chief importance, what is more importance is the criminal's thoughts, his/her quickness. The police man himself is therefore to act quickly, in real time, make
quick and clever decisions, be smart, be alert and aware, but all in
a peculiar way which ultimately shows its distance from the reality
it inhabits. In other words, the police is totally immersed in
fantasy-production at all moments and places, it traverses social spaces inasmuch as in its head there is the continuous process of fantasy production. In a sense, the fantasy's core theme is as such: that society is full of crime, and crime is now becoming smarter and strategic. As he patrols the dark and empty streets at night, the police turns his eyes into a camera, enabling his mind to produce fantasies of illegal activity and corruption. He himself has to be made continuously foreign, a process facilitated by his hostel life in the barracks, by the 'making-archaic' of his social life, by the outdated nature of the cultural products he had...he was a figure of the past in a society moving forward. Today, he is the figure of the future, in his sophisticated instruments, knowledge and the intellectual action hero with which he identifies, in a society which is itself in the present moment. Whatever the case, he is never of the time, he is never of this moment of history, but of real time, of a radical detachment from the moment in order to find a free time where he himself can thrive...which enables him to create fantasies. But one could argue that fantasies are distracting and too impractical, while the policeman himself appears so efficient. The fantasy of the police is different from the fantasy of the action hero: the hero has a 'female lead' to be saved from threat, and his fantasy is distracting, but the police finds the female lead itself as also corrupted. It doesn't save one and destroy the other, but it imprisons both because both are at fault for it, and it is this quality in its fantasy that makes it seem so efficient. It no longer does the job of judgment, it no longer faces the law, but it acts, in real time, with direct decisions because nothing indicates the endpoint of conflict and crime for it. There is no time for the law mechanism (the courts) for it, it is continuously immersed in the ending of conflict and crime. This implies that crime in Kathmandu are not really 'white collar' in nature which recourse through the law mechanism, but they are more 'blue collar' and 'require' the direct administration of discipline and control upon the citizen.
Within the barracks and the offices, there are mental examinations: one policeman tests the other officer's intellect, and hierarchies and perks are administered according to intellect rather than post, countering the previous politicization of the police, where identity-politics was an important component in how it was composed and evolved. No longer is the movement beyond one's fellow officer in rank important, but, in Deleuzian conception, a competition and rivalry with this officer, standing next to the officer and mocking him, angering him rather than frustrating him. Today, the intellectual officer is the most powerful member of the police force, but he cannot just demonstrate a bookish smartness, he has to be 'street smart' to think like a criminal; he has to comprehend situations and scenarios, but not as a permanent, established entity within these situations, but something who, like the criminal, must interact with it as if he is foreign to it. He is always a temporary presence in the social, and we see this in the continuous mobility of the police in their vehicles...they do not stick around and establish themselves in one place but keep moving so as to be foreign; patrolling is to become foreign. And he has been made so foreign to the social scenario that he can completely fantasize about it and exercise his intellect therein. No amount of barrack practice is enough, and slowly, the need for practicing police work, for 'training' a policeman, is receding, which ultimately points to the police as an organization being in crisis. It is the needs of the time that the police itself has to be anarchic, that is, without a political organization proper and out of political control, that is, thriving at an intellectual level. It is just as well that a brand new, young officer gets directly involved in a large conflict, for the unpredictability of such conflicts cannot be taught. This points to a crisis in the police force at the top of the hierarchy: their authority has been reduced to making the police present to situations, while they cannot command on how the police should act in these situations. In other words, the police has a form of freedom to articulate decisions in real time, but what is not understood by them is how these decisions are limited by what they have: their guns, their uniform, their vehicles; in short, they do not understand how direct physical authority is still the end-point of their intellect. Intellect has been used as a rationalizing force to reason and 'prove' the need for violence mathematically. One becomes both the actor and the critic. Each individual officer acts based on what he has learned, he speaks with himself and not with his superior, in that, he thinks, orders and then contemplates himself rather than obeying orders from someone else. The ordering about of citizens has been facilitated by the policing mentality in each one of us. As informal policemen, we have each become dual in our 'becoming': to order and to be ordered both with the same authority.
Within the barracks and the offices, there are mental examinations: one policeman tests the other officer's intellect, and hierarchies and perks are administered according to intellect rather than post, countering the previous politicization of the police, where identity-politics was an important component in how it was composed and evolved. No longer is the movement beyond one's fellow officer in rank important, but, in Deleuzian conception, a competition and rivalry with this officer, standing next to the officer and mocking him, angering him rather than frustrating him. Today, the intellectual officer is the most powerful member of the police force, but he cannot just demonstrate a bookish smartness, he has to be 'street smart' to think like a criminal; he has to comprehend situations and scenarios, but not as a permanent, established entity within these situations, but something who, like the criminal, must interact with it as if he is foreign to it. He is always a temporary presence in the social, and we see this in the continuous mobility of the police in their vehicles...they do not stick around and establish themselves in one place but keep moving so as to be foreign; patrolling is to become foreign. And he has been made so foreign to the social scenario that he can completely fantasize about it and exercise his intellect therein. No amount of barrack practice is enough, and slowly, the need for practicing police work, for 'training' a policeman, is receding, which ultimately points to the police as an organization being in crisis. It is the needs of the time that the police itself has to be anarchic, that is, without a political organization proper and out of political control, that is, thriving at an intellectual level. It is just as well that a brand new, young officer gets directly involved in a large conflict, for the unpredictability of such conflicts cannot be taught. This points to a crisis in the police force at the top of the hierarchy: their authority has been reduced to making the police present to situations, while they cannot command on how the police should act in these situations. In other words, the police has a form of freedom to articulate decisions in real time, but what is not understood by them is how these decisions are limited by what they have: their guns, their uniform, their vehicles; in short, they do not understand how direct physical authority is still the end-point of their intellect. Intellect has been used as a rationalizing force to reason and 'prove' the need for violence mathematically. One becomes both the actor and the critic. Each individual officer acts based on what he has learned, he speaks with himself and not with his superior, in that, he thinks, orders and then contemplates himself rather than obeying orders from someone else. The ordering about of citizens has been facilitated by the policing mentality in each one of us. As informal policemen, we have each become dual in our 'becoming': to order and to be ordered both with the same authority.
When
this new officer, hired for his supposed intellect, gets involved in a situation,
what matters in the resolution of the conflict is not the casualties
or the image of the police going forward, but how the new officer can
rationalize and reason his contributions, how he thought rather than
acted, and how he manages to articulate his thoughts before his
superiors...as if it was only an examination, an 'on-the-job
training'...he is himself as a criminal, engaged often in crime such as sexual assault, but only in order to think like the criminal thinks; his study, his education has now been taken to the extremes, he is to learn something at all costs. And what is the problem with this intellectualization of the police? The problems are many: that it gives authority a reason to exist and thrive, that emotion and a moral compass are not important, that crime itself begins to appear like an issue of intellect rather than a manifestation of class-based issues, that mechanisms of control are always a step beyond the understanding capacity and the educational systems geared towards the masses of citizens. The police is playing with the education system of the citizens, keenly observant of where it goes to change its own directions accordingly. But we, the citizens, continue to subscribe to morality as much as possible when it comes to judging the police. This moral compass is precisely what is problematic for the police. They, as our models, want to show to us how we ourselves must replace a moral compass with an intellectual drive.
The myth supporting the police's assault on society is that the mind of the policeman, his conscience, is always pure and clean, but today this has less to do with him being a good person and more to do with him reasoning his crime away as a part of the job, in that, the police has contributed to how we see conscience and the 'pure mind' differently today, namely, that we have detached the mind from the actions of the body. But we must not subscribe to the supremacy of the mind, we must not even begin to think that the 'pure mind' is all that matters; indeed, what is not true is that the mind is hard to develop and shape, because in fact the mind is the easiest thing to shape. The policeman is not judged for his actions but for his thoughts, it is intellect which takes the upper hand over his practical actions. This too shows similarity with the events of disciplining in the school system, when the student is punished, it is his intellect which is also considered. Of course his identity, whether he is male, female, black, white, is also an issue, but this persecution of the population according to identity is a thing of the past; the most important issue about the criminal is his/her intellect, it is intellect which makes a case in the law-making mechanism. Indeed, conscience is not even important, for conscience itself is derived from politics and the political, but the policing mind is stoic and mechanical at all times, driven by intellect and nothing else.
So, a governing logic of the police is 'drive-of-thought-without-planning,' and the logic is especially about: how can a policeman 'invent' knowledge out on the street, how can he act as a free thinker and not as a learner of the establishment, how can he get further and further away from reality and within fantastical constructions. To answer all of these concerns, the policeman is being modeled on the Socrates-like 'street philosopher,' who moved forward in the social out of intellectual drive rather than authority, who not only passively and privately writes his philosophy, but shares it in the social field through his actions; he has to think first and then follow it up with an act, and the act itself is not always physical in nature, but only a proclamation of thought, the verbal and visual signifying of the possibility of a threat. Like in the West, the most important police men in Nepal will soon be the detectives, the investigative ones with the badge, the forensic ones with the lab, the rebellious-intellectual ones, and not the sheriff with the gun. They will be given time to think and mingle in the populace, they will then act on their ideas. The street police will be most important, for he often does not need to answer to anyone, and even if he does, it is only to the authority one step above him. The street is getting aloof from the top-levels in the police, which has anarchic implications, and which also points to the divergence of intellectual drives within the police, one fixated on the 'bookish' and the other on the street. Indeed, the problem of today is the criminal positioning itself within this empty space between the street level and the top-level in the police mechanism. The police mechanism constantly undergoes internal rebellion which is becoming part of the work it does.
We must compare the police's uniform with the uniforms of an eager school student, both are symbols today of progressive intellectual curiosity and the intellectualization of the curiosity regarding one's own authority. Because the police is so driven by intellect all the time, it is difficult to engage with his thoughts for the citizen; the citizen is getting alienated from the police in a different way today: not at the level of authority but at the level of knowledge. How, then, can the police think like this, or rather, what allows him the space and freedom to become a street philosopher? A chief factor is the metaphors, the seemingly timeless code words the policing conversations are littered with, all of which point to the police that things can be invented, that reality itself is comfortably out of reach and therefore what is manipulated is only an illicit component within reality. The metaphors in the police are quite particular: they are not metaphors of common history and common names, spaces and events, which is the symbolic form of truth and law, but 'meta-metaphors,' which are metaphors of proper names (the police gives the name "Alpha" for a person named 'X') and specialized knowledge, which is the symbolic form of the symbolic itself, and is untouched by law. This is the logic of the police: to act upon the symbolic/particular itself from the common rather than acting from the symbolic/particular on the common, and in this regard it is illicit, it is not governed, it is kept exempt, it is the 'primordial father' of today who alone claims the satisfaction from the exercising of law. It so often is true that fantasy is composed upon the 'illicit' components of reality, and police work is not different in this regard.
The myth supporting the police's assault on society is that the mind of the policeman, his conscience, is always pure and clean, but today this has less to do with him being a good person and more to do with him reasoning his crime away as a part of the job, in that, the police has contributed to how we see conscience and the 'pure mind' differently today, namely, that we have detached the mind from the actions of the body. But we must not subscribe to the supremacy of the mind, we must not even begin to think that the 'pure mind' is all that matters; indeed, what is not true is that the mind is hard to develop and shape, because in fact the mind is the easiest thing to shape. The policeman is not judged for his actions but for his thoughts, it is intellect which takes the upper hand over his practical actions. This too shows similarity with the events of disciplining in the school system, when the student is punished, it is his intellect which is also considered. Of course his identity, whether he is male, female, black, white, is also an issue, but this persecution of the population according to identity is a thing of the past; the most important issue about the criminal is his/her intellect, it is intellect which makes a case in the law-making mechanism. Indeed, conscience is not even important, for conscience itself is derived from politics and the political, but the policing mind is stoic and mechanical at all times, driven by intellect and nothing else.
So, a governing logic of the police is 'drive-of-thought-without-planning,' and the logic is especially about: how can a policeman 'invent' knowledge out on the street, how can he act as a free thinker and not as a learner of the establishment, how can he get further and further away from reality and within fantastical constructions. To answer all of these concerns, the policeman is being modeled on the Socrates-like 'street philosopher,' who moved forward in the social out of intellectual drive rather than authority, who not only passively and privately writes his philosophy, but shares it in the social field through his actions; he has to think first and then follow it up with an act, and the act itself is not always physical in nature, but only a proclamation of thought, the verbal and visual signifying of the possibility of a threat. Like in the West, the most important police men in Nepal will soon be the detectives, the investigative ones with the badge, the forensic ones with the lab, the rebellious-intellectual ones, and not the sheriff with the gun. They will be given time to think and mingle in the populace, they will then act on their ideas. The street police will be most important, for he often does not need to answer to anyone, and even if he does, it is only to the authority one step above him. The street is getting aloof from the top-levels in the police, which has anarchic implications, and which also points to the divergence of intellectual drives within the police, one fixated on the 'bookish' and the other on the street. Indeed, the problem of today is the criminal positioning itself within this empty space between the street level and the top-level in the police mechanism. The police mechanism constantly undergoes internal rebellion which is becoming part of the work it does.
We must compare the police's uniform with the uniforms of an eager school student, both are symbols today of progressive intellectual curiosity and the intellectualization of the curiosity regarding one's own authority. Because the police is so driven by intellect all the time, it is difficult to engage with his thoughts for the citizen; the citizen is getting alienated from the police in a different way today: not at the level of authority but at the level of knowledge. How, then, can the police think like this, or rather, what allows him the space and freedom to become a street philosopher? A chief factor is the metaphors, the seemingly timeless code words the policing conversations are littered with, all of which point to the police that things can be invented, that reality itself is comfortably out of reach and therefore what is manipulated is only an illicit component within reality. The metaphors in the police are quite particular: they are not metaphors of common history and common names, spaces and events, which is the symbolic form of truth and law, but 'meta-metaphors,' which are metaphors of proper names (the police gives the name "Alpha" for a person named 'X') and specialized knowledge, which is the symbolic form of the symbolic itself, and is untouched by law. This is the logic of the police: to act upon the symbolic/particular itself from the common rather than acting from the symbolic/particular on the common, and in this regard it is illicit, it is not governed, it is kept exempt, it is the 'primordial father' of today who alone claims the satisfaction from the exercising of law. It so often is true that fantasy is composed upon the 'illicit' components of reality, and police work is not different in this regard.
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